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Category: Fake News

This year, fake news stories marred the election and continue to propagate dangerous conspiracy theories. The man behind many of them? A 40-year-old Hillary Clinton voter who lives in a Los Angeles suburb with his family.

On Monday’s Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, Jestin Coler, who has created dozens of fake-news sites, sat down for an interview about the inflammatory stories. When called out for the information he’s making up, he said “my point from the beginning was to educate consumers on content. How to identify these fake versus real (stories).”

He seems to distance himself from any effect these fake stories have on real life (such as in #Pizzagate) and sees himself as simply infiltrating conservative and alt-right readers’ feeds with garbage and satire about their beliefs. Read more…

Mark Zuckerberg may insist that Facebook doesn’t have a serious fake news problem, but his company is apparently taking steps to identify misleading stories.

Some Facebook users tweeted Monday that they received surveys from the site asking them to identify whether certain headlines are misleading.

Chris Krewson, the editor of Philadelphia news outlet Billy Penn, noticed the query under a Philadelphia Inquirer article. It asked him to identify to what extent the link’s title uses “misleading language,” with options ranging from “not at all” to “completely.”

One man has taken the fight against fake news into his own hands after his local pizza restaurant became embroiled in a dangerous conspiracy theory.

On Dec. 4, police arrested 28-year-old, Edgar Maddison Welch of Salisbury, North Carolina, after he entered Comet Ping Pong restaurant in Washington D.C. armed with an assault rifle and fired a shot. Welch claimed he was investigating conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton and campaign chairman John Podesta running a child sex ring inside of a pizza place, referred to as “#Pizzagate.”

Police in Washington, D.C. have arrested a man armed with an assault rifle who claimed he was investigating “#Pizzagate,” the fictitious conspiracy theory about Hillary Clinton running a child sex ring inside a restaurant.

Metropolitan Police received a phone call about a man with a weapon who had entered Comet Ping Pong, a popular bar and music venue in the affluent Friendship Heights neighbourhood.

The suspect, 28-year-old Edgar Maddison Welch of Salisbury, North Carolina, walked into the restaurant and “pointed a firearm in the direction of an employee of the restaurant”, police said in a statement. Read more…

Another day, another attempt by Facebook at saving face in light of that whole “fake news on Facebook is ruining news” thing. And this time, to a room full of journalists!

On Thursday, Patrick Walker of Facebook’s media partnerships for Europe apologized for mistakes Facebook made handling the fake news problem, and outlined the social network’s commitment to combatting it at the NewsXchange Conference in Copenhagen. Except, this time, the room included more than 500 journalists—the very people whose work is being devalued by the proliferation of fake news.

Facebook outlined seven principles within its plan to address fake news. CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared these steps earlier this month in a post on the platform which temporarily disappeared thanks to what Facebook claimed was a glitch. Read more…

Want to understand the problem of fake news? Want to do it while seeing how much money you just got schemed out of by Google, Amazon, or Facebook? Then take one look at the online holiday shopping bonanza: Massive corporations, peddling questionable information, to a public without sufficient tools to help separate the good from the bad.

Black Friday just gave way to Cyber Monday, and now, the internet’s lousy with “deals.” Consumers have already spent over $5.3 billion online this shopping season, according to Adobe (which doesn’t even account for weekend or Monday spending, which Adobe expects to add on another $3.4 billion). But how many people spent that money under the guise of getting a “great” deal, only to get an average (or even downright bad) deal? Read more…